Judge Dennis Davis
The Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, Part 1

Judge Dennis David and Professor David Peimer | The Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, Part 1

- How are we doing for time? All right, let’s give it a few more, a couple more seconds, actually. 30 or 40 seconds and then I’m going to hand it-

• Everybody had a good week, I hope?

• [David] Yep. You keeping okay, everybody?

• Yeah-

• Very stressful. Very stressful week here in New York with the antisemitism and-

• There was a huge demonstration in Cape Town, by the way. I mean, last weekend, massive Palestinian demonstration in Sea Point.

• Shocking, shocking rhetoric.

• [David] Terrible.

• There’s actually been some quite interesting responses from people that I’ve been sent, which I think are really very thoughtful.

• I find it quite astonishing that the Israelis are so poor in putting out the facts.

• No, that’s the irony. The irony is that there’ve been a lot of people in other parts of the world who’ve responded absolutely spot on and Israel has been nonexistent in terms of its-

• Nothing. Nothing.

• Very bad in terms, and especially on social media, you know? Really bad for social media, the Israelis.

• And a lot of my Jewish friends who when I defend Israel, have given me a go about the Israelis, the troops going into the mosque. And they were clear that Hamas were using the mosque as a launching pad for rockets and there was a lot of damage in the mosque. And so the Israelis were compelled to go in for security reasons so-

• They’ve done very-

• It’s astonishing that the Israelis actually just…

• [Dennis] I’m not sure how you deal with-

• Don’t pay attention. Anyway.

• This afternoon they showed here on BBC and Sky an interview with an Israeli pilot who was part of the bombing, but don’t show any of the others from Hamas or anywhere else, you know, so it’s like five minutes with one pilot.

• Well, because the lack of moral equivalence-

• Totally one sided.

• Yeah. Lack of moral equivalence. I could get my head around it, all these people protesting about China and about Myanmar and about Syria and everywhere else, and then they protested about, I can get my head around. But we all know that that is never going to happen. We know why.

• No, exactly.

• And the other astonishing thing is, I’m not sure if I mentioned it before, you see what’s going on at MoMA and the demands.

• I saw that, Wendy, I was really disturbed by that. That’s really-

• Yeah. Sorry.

• Led by Israeli artists, you know, together with others. Anyway, I’m going to hand over to you. Thank you very much, all of you. Thank you. I wish everybody happy Labour Day weekend. And over to David and Dennis, we thank you as always for doing this for us.

Visuals are displayed throughout the lecture.

• With pleasure, Wendy. Yeah, it’s a depressing way to start, given what we’ve just been talking about. And in a way it’s not an uninteresting way in which to or a productive way in which to actually commence because what we are talking about are the Nuremberg trials. And what we are actually talking about is a moment in history where perhaps it was possible to conceive of a cosmopolitan vision of the world in which in a sense, the exact opposite of what we’re seeing at the moment would have been a way in which the world might have been governed and in which the value system of the world might have developed.

But be that as it may, that is perhaps for another occasion. We are confronted, David and I, and again, it’s been a great exchange and again, may I as well pay tribute to Judy for all the patience and care, concern in this regard. It is a challenge to present two lectures on Nuremberg. There’s a vast library with regard to this particular set of trials. There is a huge amount of commentary and there are enormous amount of different avenues that one can take.

In other words, to keep all of the moving parts in one and do it in two sessions is really an extraordinary challenge. Even a greater one than the one we confronted over the past two Saturdays with you when we had to choose some films and not others. But be that as it may, here we are. And let me tell you what the framing of our two sessions are going to be. We are going to, as you see on the slide there, we are going to talk about the context, the background, the nature of the actual trial, of the main trial that took place at Nuremberg. There were others. Then and I will do that hopefully in a relatively reasonable amount of time.

We will then move on, David will get to talk a little bit about the individuals. A fascinating research which was done with regard to the various accused at the Nuremberg trial by people like Gustave Gilbert and other psychiatrists who were brought in and examined them. Fantastically interesting information and insight into the accused. And one can’t but help, particularly somebody like myself who’s taught this film so often and now has a film expert at my file, let me say co-joined with me at the intellectual hip to actually deal with a couple of clips, David will show with regard to “Judgement at Nuremberg,” the first of which I would if we were sitting in a room, be fascinated by your reactions because of the fact that I’ve shown this many, many times to students in New York, in Cape Town and Melbourne, all of which I’ve used this for teaching purposes.

And I’ve always been interested, particularly in the clip that we are going to show as to the reaction of young people. Some of them of course, not so young anymore because I’ve taught for so long, but certainly young in the last couple of years, their reaction, I’ll be interested in yours. But that is not where we start. Where we start is of course the fact that on the 7th of May, 1945, the Germans unconditionally surrendered. Astonishingly not more than six months later, on the 20th of November, 1945, an international military tribunal convened to basically charge what we refer to as the major war criminals of the European Axis. It opened at the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg with the reading of a hundred page indictment. How did one get there is the first question I’d like to put on the table.

What is interesting because obviously all of this was conceived not in a day or two, but as the war turned decisively in favour of the Allies, it was clear that thought was to be given to how to deal with the Nazis and their war crimes. And accordingly, a set of meetings were held in London, which culminated in what was called the so-called London Charter, which was agreed to by the United States, England, France, and the Soviet Union. And two of the principal, there’s Robert Jackson, to whom I shall return, and Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, who was the deputy chief prosecutor on the UK side, Jackson being the chief prosecutor on the US side, were obviously principal authors of this.

And it was this particular document or set of documents that culminated in what was called the London Charter, which number one, constituted this international tribunal in which there would be four judges, one drawn from each of these countries, and they would therefore be the judges who would decide the fate of those in the dock. And I’ll get there in a moment. The way that it worked was that the judges then elected one of their own to be the presiding judge and that turned out to be Sir Geoffrey Lawrence, the English judge, of which what is interesting about him, let me just say he was appointed as a KC at King’s Council in 1927.

In 1932, he was appointed as a judge of the King’s Bench Division and therefore became Sir Geoffrey. He was a judge who kept out of the limelight to a large degree, but when Lord Goddard eventually was elevated to the Law Lords, Lawrence succeeded him as the Lord Justice of Appeal in 1944. And shortly thereafter, he as an experienced judge, led Norman Birkett, second judge in the British delegation in the Nuremberg trials. He was elected as the president of all the judges. It appeared more through the lack of enemies than any other factor. In other words, it wasn’t because he was regarded as an exceptional legal talent, but he certainly presided over with great tact and his conduct was praised by many of those involved who appreciated his striving to understand the relevance of each piece of evidence.

And in fact, something which is terribly important for a judge, to prevent long-winded counsel from droning on. The principal prosecutor on the American side and the person who had driven to a large degree the London Charter and the nature thereof was of course Robert Jackson, who is an interesting man because of course he, apart from having served as Solicitor General and Attorney General during the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, joined the US Supreme Court as a justice obviously sometime before he went off to Nuremberg. And he was a dedicated, I suppose what we call New Dealer who believes institutions are the best way to reshape the world and establish a lasting peace. And by of course 1945, it was Truman who was now the president, and he appointed Jackson to be the main prosecutor. And he was obviously as the person who believed fervently in institutions, accepted the position with alacrity.

I should add that Truman then named Francis Biddle to be the American judge. He was also a particularly distinguished lawyer who sat with Sir Geoffrey Lawrence and two others, the French and Soviet judges. I’m going to talk a little bit more about them in the next session rather than this one. So those are the judges and those are the pros- And the other important prosecutor I can’t help but mention in this demartis personai was of course Hartley Shawcross, strange enough died at the ripe old age of 101 as Lord Shawcross and who curiously had been born in Giessen in Germany, where his father was a professor of English literature. Shawcross himself basically was a Labour Party man. And he was appointed, of course, by Attlee to lead the British prosecution at Nuremberg alongside Allied colleagues.

He made the opening and closing speeches for the British case. And there’s no doubt that he was regarded as a absolutely superb forensic advocate. The defendants, he said, and I’ll just get a quote this right up front, “were black hearted murderers, plunderers, and conspirators of which the world has not known their equal.” The writer Rebecca West, who was at Nuremberg, described Hartley Shawcross’ closing speech as full as the living pity, which gave the men in the box their worst hour. He then, back in England, he as the Attorney General then led the prosecution of Lord Haw-Haw, William Joyce, and then continued with a distinguished legal career thereafter but I’m not going to go into that further, just to give you a taste of Shawcross. Now that having been said, the way it then worked was that the indictment, which I’ve made reference essentially, and I’m going to able oversimplify because otherwise I’ll be held all night or you will with me.

And the answer is that there were four fundamental counts, which comprised the indictment against the accused. The first charge was the common plan of conspiracy to commit crimes against peace and war crimes and crimes against humanity. The second count charged the actual commission of crimes against peace, namely preparation and waging of aggressive wars, which were also in the violation of international treaties. The third count alleged certain war crimes, namely violations of the laws or customs of war, including murder or ill treatment of civilian populations and prisoners of war. And the fourth count, alleged crimes against humanity, namely extermination, enslavement, and other inhuman treatment of civilian populations, either before or during the war, before or during the war mind you, or persecution on political, racial, or religious grounds.

Let me make one other set of introductory remarks on this because you’ll have seen these counts were of course controversial. And they were controversial because of something which many of you have read about, presumably more recently, which is of course is the “East West Street”. And the wonderful exposition in that book by Philippe Sands of two of the most important characters who were really important in the debate about how one was going to frame charges against the Nazis. The first of course was Hersch Lauterpacht, who of course, just like the other Raphael Lemkin, came from Lviv, hence their link to the book, which I’ve mentioned, Philippe Sand’s book.

The long and the short of it was that Lauterpacht eventually came to London, where he got a doctorate and then became professor of international law at Cambridge University. I noticed that Philippe talks about the fact that he was taught by his son, Elihu Lauterpacht. And in fact, I remember sitting in on the lectures of Lauterpacht at that time when I was at Cambridge but that’s another story. Now Lauterpacht, sorry, I’m just getting my battery. Lauterpacht, his line of argument was that of course the indictment, which is exactly what I’ve read out to you, basically told you, his indictment was that these were the crimes for which the Nazis should be charged.

His argument was that the fundamental proposition which Lemkin had advanced, namely the idea of genocide should not be included within the charges which were going to be levelled against the Nazis. And if I can just briefly say, Lemkin in 1944 had written a book called “Axis Rule in Occupied Europe,” in which he discarded the terms barbarity and vandalism and coined this new term genocide to articulate his argument that the Nazis were engaged in a special crime, namely a systemic campaign to exterminate ethnic nations and ethnic groups that went way beyond typical war crimes and acts of repression. And he was lobbied hard for the genocide to be one of the charges which were levied didn’t occur.

One of the influential factors in Lemkin’s life was having watched in 1929 the Berlin trial of Tehlirian, the Armenian assassin of Talaat Pasha, the former Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire, who it was considered was widely thought of as responsible for the Armenian genocide. And the point that Lemkin made, and I raise it with you, how could it be possible here then that you could basically criminalise the Armenian killing of one man, Pasha, and that could be a crowd. But Pasha’s killing of 1 million in the Armenian genocide was an allowable act of state protected by sovereign immunity. So that is how he started to get to the idea of genocide.

The fundamental point was that Lemkin had far less influence in the framing of the charges than Lauterpacht, who was very close to Robert Jackson and effectively therefore, they did not use the term genocide, save in Maxwell Fyfe’s cross-examination of von Nuerath, the former foreign minister of Protectorate Bohemia and Hartley Shawcross’ closing statement. But basically it was emitted. And I’ll just leave this point with you. The big debate is whether in fact one criminalises groups or one criminalises individuals.

Lauterpacht said this, “If one emphasises too much that it’s a crime to kill a whole people, it may weaken the conviction, but it’s already a crime to kill one person.” In other words, the idea and then firstly, the emphasis on groups both as victims and perpetrators would intensify tribal instincts and polarisation than us ironically making the acts that the notion of genocide sought to criminalise more rather than less likely to occur and reconciliation after such events even more difficult to obtain.

I raised that with you because we could have a really interesting debate about this particular point. I asked Philippe Sands about this when I interviewed him in front of all of you, many of you attended, and I’m still somewhat troubled about why in fact genocide was eschewed but it was. And so accordingly, that really played very little role and it was the Lauterpacht arguments about crimes against humanity as I framed them for you from the description of a very lengthy indictment that took centre stage. What I want to do now is play the first clip, just to give you a sense of here we were at Nuremberg, the very city in which the Nazis had held their rallies, which had been totally eviscerated by Allied bombing, but where the courthouse was still intact and where the trial actually took place. So what we’re going to see, just a five minute tip which will give you a sense of the picture and context before I just make a few further remarks.

[Plays clip]

• Nuremberg spring 1945. The city where the Nazi Party held its rallies lies in ruins. Amidst the rubble from their bombs, the Allies chose this as the symbolic site for an international tribunal where the chief Nazi figures that they had arrested would be tried. The Soviets whose civilian and military losses ran to over 20 million were not at all inclined to give the Nazis the benefit of a trial.

The British, after some hesitation, decided to support the idea of equitable justice. But it was the Americans, geographically removed from the atrocities committed in Europe, who played a major role in the conception of this novel legal tribunal. President Truman appointed Justice Robert Jackson to set it up. Teams were sent to Europe to find evidence and conduct preliminary interrogations. One of the few buildings to have been spared in the bombing was the courthouse. And it was there on November 20th, 1945 that the trial began barely six months after the surrender of the Third Reich. To draw widest possible public attention, the Allies introduced a unique plan to film key parts of the trial and to call upon renowned film director John Ford to handle the task. Today, this extensive footage, for the most part never before seen, allows us to witness the powerful sight of the Nazis brought face to face with their crimes.

Each of the accused was to occupy the same seating arrangement for the entire length of the trial, according to their degree of responsibility. Goring was thus the first to enter, followed by Admiral Donitz, briefly president of the Reich in the days following Hitler’s death. Rudolf Hess, who’s departure for England in 1941 did not lessen his previous responsibilities, sat beside Goring. Admiral Raeder, the head of the wartime navy from 1935 to 1943 came in next.

Joachim von Ribbentrop, foreign affairs minister. Baldur von Schirach, head of the Hitler Youth. Wilhelm Keitel, Hitler’s military chief of staff. Fritz Sauckel promoted in 1943 by the Fuhrer to the post of Chief of Forced Labour in occupied Europe. Hjalmar Schacht, Minister of Economics from 1934 to 1937. Hans Fritzche, radio chief to Goebbels. Walther Funk, Schacht’s successor as economics minister. Konstantin von Neurath, Foreign Affairs Minister, then Protectorate of Bohemia Moravia. Julius Streicher, a fierce anti-Semitic propagandist.

Albert Speer, the architect of Nazi rallies in Nuremberg, who during the war became minister for armament and production. Wilhelm Frick, home affairs minister, then Protectorate of the Reich in Bohemia Moravia. Arthur Seyss-Inquart, architect of Austria’s annexation to the Reich in 1938. Hans Frank, governor-general of Poland. Franz von Papen, who contributed to Hitler’s arrival in power and went on to become the Reich’s ambassador in Turkey.

Alfred Rosenberg, anti-Semitic theorist and minister for the Eastern occupied territories. Alfred Jodl, chief of staff for German army operations. Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Heydrich’s SS successor in 1943 to the post of head of the Reich’s Supreme Security Office. What was their state of mind as the trial began? Time at least was on their side, as it postponed the day of judgement.

[End clip]

• Right. I’m going to in a couple of minutes hand it over to David and he can talk about the state of mind of these various through the evidence that we have in this particular regard but I’m going to flip over the other clip I’ve got in the interest of time which is going ‘cause I want to make two final points.

The first is just to mention, 'cause I will talk about the verdict and the nature thereof at our second session. But I do want, if I may, to just read to you a little bit of the opening statement of Robert Jackson when the trial began on the 20th of November, 1945. Remember by then of course Hitler was dead, Himmler and Goebbels were also dead, but basically they had got the rest of the crew as it were. And don’t you notice, I do apologise for the fact that the clip wasn’t perhaps as good as it should be 'cause of just the inability, I suppose, to convert on the system as best we can. But it is extraordinary the way they sort of sat there, if you watched the clip, sort of almost greeting each other as long lost friends, even though they were by then not long lost friends. Just revolting.

But be that as it may. The opening statement began as follows and it is a remarkable passage. “The privilege of opening the first trial in history for crimes against the peace of the world imposes a grave responsibility. The wrongs that we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated. That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgements of the rule of the law is one of the most significant tributes that power has ever paid to reason.”

Then he turned to the defendants in the dock and he said this, “Merely as individuals their fate is of little consequence to the world. What makes this inquest significant is that these prisoners represent sinister influences that’ll lurk in the world long after their bodies have returned to dust. There are living symbols of racial hatreds, of terrorism and violence, and arrogance and cruelty of power. There are symbols of fierce nationalism, of militarism, of intrigue and war-making which have embroiled Europe generation after generation, crushing its manhood, destroying its homes, and impoverishing its life. They have so identified themselves with the philosophies they conceive and with the forces they’ve directed that any tenderness to them is a victory and any encouragement to all the evils which are attached to their names. Civilization can afford no compromise with the social forces which gained renewed strength if we deal ambiguously or indecisively with the men in whom those forces now precariously survive.”

It’s a remarkable passage which opened the trial. It framed the trial and maybe it should frame a lot of thinking in the contemporary period, but I shall return to that. The only other remark I wanted to make before I hand it over to David to talk about the way in which these accused, who we now know because the clip has given you all of them, is analysed, was the problem in relation to the framing of the charges, which I’ve given you, which was about the retrospectivity quest, that is that the carrot of international law basically held itself against retrospectivity. And the issue which still comes up for debate is were they being charged retrospective?

Now it is true that the rule against retrospectively was of course fundamental to well-developed legal systems. During the early development of our common law offences like killing and robbery that shocked the moral offence of the community had been retrospectively transformed into crimes for which individual punishment was exacted. Similarly, individual punishment for war crimes and this is why the answer against it had become an established feature of international law without any express provision for individual punishments in organic documents such as the Geneva Convention.

At that international was the best primitive system, it lacked, well it still does really, an authoritative legislative body but be that as it may, it does have a legislative body of men through the UN, and like the early common law, dependent on case by case development. The strict and automatic application of the principle against retrospectivity in such a system would’ve created far too large a gap between the law and a developing moral sense of the world community, which had emerged thanks to that war. In short, the principle and the argument against retrospectivity was the principle of justice and the reasons behind it were totally inapplicable and totally at war with the whole fundamental trajectory of Nazi leadership.

It is a controversial proposition, and I’ll merely leave you with this, that many critics said, “Well, what about Soviet aggression against Poland, the Baltic states and Finland?” What about the fact that Stalin stayed the advance into Warsaw? And in fact, when David and I spoke about “The Pianist,” part of “The Pianist” precisely shows that, that when there was an uprising in Warsaw, Stalin actually halted on the river and allowed the Nazis to slaughter thousands of the people who were uprising simply because it suited his better ends. So these particular questions are there and perhaps next week we can return to them.

But Jackson’s line of argument, which of course held sway was that you could not use, that effectively, all that the charter had done, which gave bias to the indictment, was to conceptualise that which was inherent in the common law and in the law of civilised nations at that time. And of course what it did do was then codify it and gave us a body of international law, the implications of which we will canvas next week. But that was the basic setup of the trial. And what becomes really interesting is as the evidence was developed through this particular trial, of course, psychologists were brought into action in order to examine these people whom were all on the accused. And David, I’m going to hand over to you now to talk about that particular component. We’ll come back to “Judgement at Nuremberg” a little later.

• Thanks so much Dennis, and really appreciate our conversations during the week as always and you know, your opening and bringing us into this whole topic. Do you want to see this one other clip before we go onto the film?

• No, no, no. I want to give you more time.

• Okay, sure. Okay, so to complement what Dennis has been describing, which is the conceptual overview and the contextual overview of who these characters were, the nature of the trial, the specificity of the charges, the notion of genocide from Lemkin, et cetera, to then zoom in if you like, and hone in on some of the specifics and some of these individuals so as to balance the overall crucial big picture with the specifics of why these were chosen, what they represented, and in a way to try, as Dennis was saying, to get into the mind, the mindset of some of these individuals. At the time, philosophically, this whole question of what is evil, what is not evil? You know, Hannah Arendt’s later phrase we all know, the narrative of evil, whatever, et cetera, but the questions of profoundly disturbed humanity. Was this evil, was this something beyond? Were different philosophical, conceptual understandings required?

A whole new branch, not only of psychology, but of thinking? Would it be appropriate to think of literature, any of the so-called great evil characters in literature? Was this something completely beyond the pale that had never seen before? Was this linked to other things? Questions after questions. And I think many scholars, writers, artists at the time were profoundly and rightly obsessed with trying to look at this. So I want to hone in first before going on to those individuals, specifically on the film “Judgement at Nuremberg,” two short clips where, this is a film made by Abby Mann and Stanley Kramer, his right hand director who also did “Ship of Fools,” which we showed the other week.

The brilliant writer Abby Mann and the brilliant director Stanley Kramer. And in essence, this short clip shows the fictional eminent Judge Ernst Janning played by Burt Lancaster in a remarkable performance. And part of the whole trial has been to show that he was just obeying the law, not only following orders, but he was obeying the law of the time in his country. How can you hold that against him, et cetera. And then this is the speech at the end.

• No, that’s not it, David.

• Sorry, it’s this one.

• That was my clip. That’s the one. Here’s the one.

• Okay, and Spencer Tracy plays Francis Biddle, the American judge that Dennis mentioned.

[Plays Clip]

• Herr Janning, you may proceed.

• I wish to testify about the Feldenstein case because it was the most significant trial of the period. It is important, not only for the tribunal to understand it, but for the whole German people. But in order to understand it, one must understand the period in which it happened. There was a fever over the land, a fever of disgrace, of indignity, of hunger. We had a democracy, yes, but it was torn by elements within. Above all, there was fear. Fear of today, fear of tomorrow, fear of our neighbours and fear of ourselves. Only when you understand that can you understand what Hitler meant to us. Because he said to us, “Lift your heads. Be proud to be German. There are devils among us, communists, liberals, Jews, gipsies. Once these devils will be destroyed your misery will be destroyed.”

It was the old, old story of the sacrificial lamb. What about those of us who knew better, we who knew the words were lies and worse than lies? Why did we sit silent? Why did we take part? Because we loved our country. What difference does it make if a few political extremists lose their rights? What difference does it make if a few racial minorities lose their rights? It is only a passing phase. It is only a stage we are going through. It will be discarded sooner or later. Hitler himself will be discarded, sooner or later. The country is in danger. We will march out of the shadows. We will go forward. Forward is the great password.

And history tells how well we succeed, Your Honour. We succeeded beyond our wildest dreams. The very elements of hate and power about Hitler that mesmerised Germany, mesmerised the world. We found ourselves with sudden powerful allies. Things that had been denied to us as a democracy were open to us now. The world said, “Go ahead. Take it. Take it! Take Sudetenland! Take the Rhineland! Re-militarize it! Take all of Austria! Take it!” And then one day we looked around and found that we were in an even more terrible danger. The ritual began in this courtroom swept over the land like a raging, roaring disease. What was going to be a “passing phase” had become the way of life.

Your Honour, I was content to sit silent during this trial. I was content to tend my roses. I was even content to let counsel try to save my name, until I realised that in order to save it, he would have to raise the spectre again. You have seen him do it. He has done it, here, in this courtroom. He has suggested that the Third Reich worked for the benefit of people. He has suggested that we sterilised men for the welfare of the country. He has suggested that perhaps the old Jew did sleep with the 16 year old girl after all.

Once more, it is being done for love of country. It is not easy to tell the truth. But if there is to be any salvation for Germany, we who know our guilt must admit it, whatever the pain and humiliation. I had reached my verdict on the Feldenstein case before I ever came into the courtroom. I would’ve found him guilty whatever the evidence. It was not a trial at all. It was a sacrificial ritual in which Feldenstein, the Jew, was a helpless victim.

• Your Honour, I must interrupt. The defendant is not aware of what he’s saying. He’s not aware of the implications!

• I am aware. I am aware! My counsel would have you believe we were not aware of the concentration camps. Not aware. Where were we? Where were we when Hitler began shrieking his hate in Reichstag? Where were we when our neighbours were being dragged out in the middle of the night to Dachau? Where were we when every village in Germany has a railroad terminal where cattle cars were filled with children being carried off to their extermination? Where were we when they cried out in the night to us? Were we deaf? Dumb? Blind?!

• Your Honour, I must protest.

• My council says we were not aware of the extermination of the millions. He would give you the excuse: We were only aware of the extermination of the hundreds. Does that make us any the less guilty?

[End clip]

• Going to hold it there. And I think fairly self-explanatory, extraordinary writing and riveting, remarkable acting. So controlled, the controlled fury inside him, knowing his own guilt and rage in what he’d done. So in this performance, I think we captured a lot of the ideas of trying to get inside the mindset of the period, of the perpetrators and the leaders of the perpetrators. In this case, the character set up as of one of the leaders of the judicial system. Playing into all the themes that Dennis has mentioned earlier. In the interviews, which I’m going to come onto in a moment just after the next brief clip, the interviews, which the two psychologists, the psychiatrists, remarkable. Douglas Kelley and the psychologist, the Jewish one, Gustave Gilbert and also Leon Goldensohn.

The three of them had numerous interviews with all the prisoners in the Nuremberg trial over a five, six month period. And they had access to talk and the interviews were meant to be private, et cetera. For this primary reason to understand who were these men, what was the mindset, not only of them, but of the period. How come so many was in the fever of the land or hypnotised or caught up in this. And each with their own perspective and their own psychology and to answer the question so fundamentally profound of our times and of all times, what really possessed and what is really evil and how does it come about? Endless question but important to constantly confront.

Here’s a short section of an interview with Goring, which Gustave Gilbert did, where Goring said the following, which links to this clip exactly. It doesn’t, this is Goring speaking. “It doesn’t matter whether you’re in democracy or dictatorship. The people always follow the bidding of the leaders. It’s easy to make them do what you want. All you have to do is tell them they’re being attacked and denounce the pacifists for their lack of patriotism. They’re being attacked, whether foreigners from the outside, immigrants, whether the Jew or the gypsy or the sick from inside, it doesn’t matter. Tell them they’re being attacked and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”

That’s Goring. And Hanz Fritzsche, one of the characters you saw earlier in the other clip, who was Goebbels’ head of radio in the propaganda ministry: “Never underestimate the power of the big lie.”

And I think this character here, the Abby Mann writing of Ernst Janning, this character Burt Lancaster, is trying to get to that. How could all this propaganda, how could all this way of changing and manipulating people’s minds, not only that, but then leading them into extermination, annihilation and global war.

The second clip’s a short one between Spencer Tracy playing the Judge Francis Biddle, the American judge Dennis mentioned, and Marlene Dietrich, who plays the wife of a top, very high ranking Nazi general. And it’s again about did we know, didn’t we know kind of question. Listen to the sound as the music and the sound develops in the background.

[Plays clip] - I saw Mr. Perkins today. He told me they’d showed those pictures in the courtroom. Colonel Lawson’s favourite pictures. He drags them out at any pretext, doesn’t he? Colonel Lawson’s private chamber of horrors. Is that what you think we are? Do you think we knew of those things? Do you think we wanted to murder women and children? Do you believe that? Do you?

• Mrs. Bertholt, I don’t know what to believe.

• Good God, we are sitting here drinking. How could you think that we knew? We did not know. We did not know!

• As far as I can make out, no one in this country knew. Mrs. Bertholt, your husband was one of the heads of the army.

• And he did not know. I tell you he did not know. It was Himmler. It was Goebbels. The SS knew what happened. We did not know. Listen to me. There are things that happened on both sides. My husband was a military man all his life. He was entitled to a soldier’s death. He asked for that. I tried to get that for him. Just that, that he would die with some honour. I went from official to official. I begged for that. I begged for that. That he should be permitted the dignity of a firing squad. You know what happened? He was hanged with the others. And after that I knew what it was to hate. I never left the house, I never left the room. I drank. I hate it with every fibre of my being. I hated every American I’ve ever known. But one can’t live with hate, I know that. Dan, we have to forget, if we are to go on living.

[End clip]

• Okay, I wanted to show this because in the way the first clip, it’s the camera that is almost inside the mind of the Burt Lancaster character. And we are following the thinking as the camera moves slowly across his face and then behind the jurors and the interpreters with the earphones. Here, what Stanley Kramer and Abby Mann are doing, they’re using the incredible power of simple setting of the two characters. The denial, didn’t know, we didn’t know, even though her husband’s the head of the army, and the sound of the singing and the building of the nationalism yet again in the singing and the beer. Simple objects in a simple setting and yet so powerful. This for me is one of the most powerful individualised scenes for me ever made.

Similar to the scene in “Cabaret” where the song “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” where you see the little young boy of Hitler Youth starting to sing and beautiful and then it starts to change as everyone gets caught up in the apparently hypnotic trance of nationalist singing. Here similarly, sound, voice and singing used in the background to create this incredible emotional effect. So to go back to Kelley and Gilbert, and their books are fascinating, where they were trying to question, were these guys insane? Were they not? The ones we saw coming in at the beginning of the Nuremberg trial. And these are some of them here.

I’m going to briefly talk about some of them. First of all, they did tests on them and they both concluded, both Gilbert and Kelley, that they were sane. These guys, none of them were in any way legally or physically or physiologically insane. The conversations they had, what was revealed, ‘cause also, one needs to remember that these guys, well all 21, were interviewed by Gilbert and Kelley and Goldensohn later, but none of the interviews could be used as part of the trial. And that’s important because quite a bit of this, the more inner thoughts perhaps is revealed than obviously the public image and the lies and the denial and deception some of them are going to portray in the trial itself.

The conclusions Gilbert came to was that there was a culture where the value of deference to authority was primary, where reason and intelligence took a backseat in Gilbert’s words. And Gilbert warned in his book towards the end of it, he argues that democracy has to balance the nature of obedience and deference to authority and especially the deference to the authority of the individual or a few collective elected leaders in a democracy. Kelley cautioned that a Nazi style government, in his own words, “would certainly be possible in America. This was not a product of insane leaders.”

Kelley in particular did a lot of work with Goring because Goring was amongst the most intelligent of them all. And sadly in 1958, Kelley committed suicide via cyanide poisoning, similar to what Goring did in his prison cell as everyone knows. So to have a look at some of these characters here, Goring in the bottom, in the middle, flanked by the two American MPs in the trial itself, this is the photo from the trial of Goring. And I’ve purposely chosen these pictures 'cause it shows them out of uniform except for the one on the bottom right. Goring in the bottom has an IQ- They also IQ tests on all these leaders. No time ever other time in history has it ever been done. IQ of Goring, 138. None of them were idiots in this trial, really. Goring is part of the Red Baron elite flying squadron in the first World War. Prussian background, et cetera, et cetera. I’m not going to go into that much. But highly charismatic, greatly influenced as we know.

But what comes out in the interview with Gilbert and Kelley is the pettiness, similar to what one reads with Speer’s “Inside the Third Reich,” this endless jockeying for Hitler’s favour for power. Who’s up the ladder? Snakes and ladders. Who’s up, who’s down? Who’s in, who’s out? Endless. He talks about his hate of Goebbels, his hate of Himmler, and why, and et cetera, et cetera. It’s a endless pettiness. And it’s almost as if this huge picture of the camps, of the hell, of the war, of the extermination of 60 million dead is almost so… Exists beyond the window in a way for Goring. The obsession with himself, but obsession with the inner circle of evil.

Then I want to next go to a little bit of the bottom right next to Goring as we look at the guy with the glasses. This is a guy, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, forgive my pronunciation of the German. This guy has an IQ of 141. He’s in charge of the Nazi occupation of Holland and responsible for the deportation and murder of at least 140,000 Dutch Jews amongst many, many others. This guy there. On the left at the bottom row next to Goring, that’s Hans Frank. Frank, as we all know, is called the Butcher of Poland, the governor of Poland. IQ of 133. It’s fascinating to read the interviews with Gilbert and Kelley in particular with Hans Frank where he admits, yes, it was terrible the concentration camps, but it was all Hitler’s fault and Himmler and he had to follow the orders, otherwise, et cetera.

What he goes on about more and more in the interviews, and this is over months, is his failed marriage. The disastrous marriage, how much the wife and the children, his mistresses and girlfriends he was forced to have. And Hitler made him stay with his wife, trying to demonstrate that it was Hitler’s fault, that Hitler ran all their lives in a way, denial to the Nth degree. He talks about reading Freud and Einstein. And he’s actually read some of the letters, the correspondence. He understands it, he’s read them. And he said, “Freud was the great genius. He foresaw what we were going to do.”

This is all coming out in the interviews and you can see, he actually has read it in the interviews. And the top right obviously is Speer, as we all know. High IQ, 133. Don’t need to go into him and his justifications and his lies that there should be a sort of, you know, that he didn’t know personally, but all of them were guilty by de facto. Of course he knew. And as we’ve discussed before, of course he knew and it came out much later in evidence in Gitta Sereny and others who’ve written about Speer’s life.

In the top middle, Baldur von Schirach, he’s the guy who ran the Hitler Youth. And this guy has an IQ of 132. Balder von Schirach is interesting. In the interviews with Gilbert and Kelley, he talks about everything is rationalised and intellectualised. Seen as the communist and the capitalist, the youth and how education works and the system, et cetera. He’s trying to give a rational justification for everything. In the framing, it’s in the grand narrative of why were the West not supportive when they wanted to defeat Bolshevism and communism and the horror of private property and private ownership. And the whole of the youth had to be geared towards this and nationalism, of course, et cetera.

Baldur von Schirach then became the Gauleiter of Vienna, responsible for 185,000 Jews being deported to the camps. But he minimises and said, “No, I was only in charge of 60,000 being deported.” The denials, the justifications, the rationalisations, the use of philosophy, of intellectualization, all the classic techniques we all know only too well, every human being uses but on this extreme scale, obviously.

Top left is Hjalmar Schacht. This is the guy who was Hitler’s minister of finance from the thirties to the end of the 1930s. Brilliant. This guy has the highest IQ of all, 145. His understanding of the Treaty of Versailles and how it linked with the economy, how it linked with exports, and how Germany could not get the money from exports, especially after the Wall Street crash, the removal by the Western Allies of the loans to the Germans and the role they played. So they couldn’t remake the economy, how he links unemployment with the Treaty of Versailles with the loans with the Western Allies.

And the greatest thing, again, of the hatred of Bolshevism and the abolition of private property. Why could the West not understand what we were trying to do? We had to build it, unemployment, et cetera. Why the Germans went for Hitler in those six years before the war. Hjalmar Schacht. He’s a bit more interesting because in 1939, Hitler kicks him out and replaces him with Funk, one of the other guys we saw because he has a disagreement with Hitler. But nevertheless, he is part of re-arming, the re-armament and the rebuilding of the Germany economy, which of course financed and resourced everything so that Hitler could achieve what he achieved and they could all achieve what they achieved.

The interviews are fascinating with all these different characters for that reason, and just to mention one or two other points before going on towards the end now, if one wants, one can look at all the IQs of all of them. Keitel, one of the lackeys, head of the military, Ribbentrop, et cetera, all of this was done which is interesting. Donitz, very high IQ, head of the Navy. He was the one who instituted the U-boat philosophy and don’t pick up the survivors, the sailors when you’ve downed so many U-boats have brought down, you know, some of the shipping. Raeder who was the one to disagree with Donitz.

And Raeder is the one here, IQ 134, building the Bismark and these other huge warships of the time not believing in the aircraft carrier. Finally, what I want to come to in a way is a couple of phrases which I think stimulates the mind, provoke us, really, what is the nature of the mindset of these people? How they could actually go this far and achieve and get away with it? Hannah Arendt, “The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be either good or evil.” It’s a profoundly provocative thought which I’ve puzzled over many times and I’m sure many people have. Nobody decides like “Richard III,” you know, therefore, because I cannot prove a lover, I will prove a villain. Nobody consciously chooses as in Shakespeare, right now I’m going to be a villain because I’m a hunchback, I can’t be a lover. I mean, that’s a great artist doing something in a two hour play.

But none of these people think they’re evil or doing great evil, they’re doing good for nationalist, other reasons and so on. What does that say about the human mind’s capacity to not bear too much of reality? Douglas Kelley at the end, “Strong, dominant, aggressive, egocentric personalities. Their lack of conscience is not rare. They can be found anywhere in any country, behind big desks deciding the fate of businesses, people and their nations.” And Kelley together with Gilbert, but in particular more Kelley, led to the experiments of Milgram and many of the others later, whether we agree with them or not.

But coming out of this era of trying to understand could this be done in other countries, could it happen in democracies or not? How could it happen that so many went into blind obedience, as Gilbert said. Could it happen in democracy? As Gilbert posed at the end of his book. These questions which haunt pre the war, post the war, the questions which I think haunt us all today, and in trying to show these brief clips, I think it’s important. Because of course it can happen again and again. In breath, great phrase, you know, the bitch is stirring yet again and he means the bitch of nationalism and pride, et cetera. Hans Fritzche, who was the radio head of Goebbels’ propaganda department, throughout history to advocate racial prejudice was the way to be the spiritual father of mass murder. It’ll happen anywhere at any time.

Okay, want to hold the chair, Dennis, if you’d like to come-

• Yeah, I’m going to make one or two final remarks before we take questions, David.

Firstly, apropos the extraordinary and you’re dead right. I mean, every time I teach it, in fact, I did spend a whole section on the entire “Judgement at Nuremberg” earlier in this Lockdown University. It’s a fantastic one. Perhaps we should do it again, you and I, but be as it may. The interesting thing is the trial that he is talking about, the Feldenstein trial, actually was a real trial of a man called Katzenberger, and that’s exactly what happened. In fact, it was even worse. There was even less evidence in the Katzenberger trial so it’s interesting that Mann and Kramer actually used a real case in order to explicate that.

The second is, anybody who is interested in any of this, there’s a wonderful book by Ingo Muller, M-U-L-L-E-R, called “Hitler’s Justice”. Well worth a read if you are going to want to know about any of this. And then secondly, just with regard to Gilbert, it’s interesting that his book, “The Psychology of Dictatorship,” is available on the internet for free. And there are just two comments I want to make. One about him and one about Kelley. When he concludes the book by saying there were three different personality types in this group of 21, all who could be classified under psychopathetic personality, schizoid, narcissistic and paranoid types.

And thus their pathology led them he said, to engage in their horrific actions. Very interesting that. Kelley made the point as David has suggested about could happen in the States, but talking about the fact that what really was at the heart, there was what he called a sociocultural disease, which of course gives us pause, does it not? And we will look at that again next week and try to draw some of those implications. And then the final point, which I clean forgot, which was very naughty me to do, was that in the charter, of course, the question was how were they going to respond to these charges against them? And the charter preempted certain aspects thereof.

For example, it rejected expressly the application of acts of state and superior orders, which might otherwise immunise the defendants. It did permit superior orders as a mitigating aspect, but not in terms of conviction. And then Article 9 of the charter had this very interesting provision that in the trial of any individual member of an organisation, the charter authorised the tribunal declare the organisation such as, for example, the SS, as a criminal organisation.

So it actually went that far and so it took away superior orders as a defence and it allowed as it were, even if it didn’t have the genocide argument, certainly looked at groups as like an organisation as the SS and said that can be declared as indeed it was a criminal organisation. But many of the other issues we will touch on next week as we talk about the verdict and the implications and drawing out some of the implications that David had mentioned. So perhaps we can just turn to questions, if I can get them. Ah, here we are.

• Sure. Q&A and Comments

• [Dennis] Alright, David, I’ll, yeah. I think, here we go. Oh, sorry, I think I started at the bottom. Maybe get the top. Please feel free. Oh, some of them are about- Oh. Oh. I don’t know why I can’t see now my transcript. You may want to take over.

• Sure. I can come in and help you out Dennis. Tommy first, Tommy.

Q: How come the Allies repeatedly denied or minimised their knowledge of the camps when they were pre-planning the prosecution of the Nazi leaders? Would you like to take that, Dennis?

• Yeah, sorry. I’m just trying to- Oh.

• [David] Tommy.

• Sorry David. I was battling to- Home come the-

• Okay, no problem.

A: Yeah. Well, the answer was, you know, it’s an interesting question, Tommy. I honestly don’t know the answer to that. I mean, sorry, the answer to that is the broader question as you know, and I don’t need to tell you about the fact that the Allied conduct in relation not bombing the camps, not dealing with the camps is actually shameful. In relation to the question of the knowledge of the camps and the mass murders, well, they must have known about it, they did know about it, they had a lot of evidence and Jackson, Jackson used much of that evidence.

At the time, I suspect that they were pre-planning the prosecution, they would’ve known that because one of the issues that we know from the massive documentation with Nuremberg is that they spent quite a couple of months after the London Charter and even before then, Jackson trying to get as much evidence as they possibly could.

So they certainly would’ve known about the concentration camps. My suspicion is that they minimised it because of their own shameful conduct in not dealing with it in any other way during the case of the war itself. I know that Trudy has spoken about that and I myself have raised this particular point. It’s an inexplicable question, which I don’t have a proper answer, I’m sorry.

• Just to add, if I may there, Dennis and Tommy, I’ve recently read this fascinating book on the live bombing campaign. So when they’re bombing Hamburg, Dresden, Wurzburg, et cetera, extraordinary, a number of, in term of bombs being obviously offloaded onto Germany and elsewhere. Even before D-Day, the amount of bombing of the railway lines, they could bomb exact railway stations of small villages and towns. Bomb the railway lines all in preparation before D-Day and the bombings of Germany et cetera in ‘43 going into '44. Extraordinary precise amount of bombing and the quantity.

• Surgical bombing.

• Going about it, they could have easily have bombed a small railway station, the trains, et cetera, any time.

• It’s inexplicable.

• [David] Yeah.

• Yeah. Well, Francis, yes, I take your point with regard to Hamas. I don’t, obviously that’s not part of our debate tonight, but I think we should be talking about this. I find the manner in which anti-Israel people never deal with Hamas, and how you can actually not take account of the fact that we are dealing with a fundamentalist organisation, which is anti-women, anti-pluralism, anti-democracy, and which would ultimately cause utter mayhem if they had half the chances. Indeed they do, in Gaza. I am not able to answer that. And I think the question is, there’s a broader debate out there, which I certainly am happy to participate in, but I’m not prepared at all to count Hamas in part that, but I won’t go further.

• And just to add in there, if I may Dennis, what I watched today was an interview on Sky and BBC which was about a three minute interview, which was long on a news interview, with an Israeli pilot. And the journalist questioning how you could bomb these buildings, et cetera, in the middle of the city and civilians and so on. But not one five second clip on anything else of the rockets or anything else, or any other aspect or a Syrian bomb, nothing, no context whatsoever. Taken out of context. The portrayal is so clear and so edited and filmed and shown. And that particular moment in the news, it’s so powerful and so clear, you know?

• It’s a desperate problem because somebody like myself who’s deeply sympathetic to human rights, obviously we would love to have a serious debate about this. How can you possibly have that if people aren’t prepared to deal with Hamas properly? And by the way, what was sent to me today, many of you might have got it in your own way, was a podcast, a short podcast clip from Daniel Rosenberg, the London lawyer. It’s absolutely marvellous. If you’ve got it, you should listen to it, it’s fantastic.

Q: Alan, if Hitler had survived and come to trial with the other criminals at Nuremberg, which must have been something the trial planners considered, would he have been treated just like the others or differently? A: That is an absolutely fascinating question, Alan, and I’ll tell you why. Because Stalin certainly would not have wanted Hitler put on trial at all. In fact, to the contrary. Stalin would’ve liked to deal with Hitler in his Gulag style rather than in any kind of trial. And in fact, there is evidence when you look at some of the data about the London Charter, et cetera, there’s no doubt that the Russians would’ve in fact taken a totally different attitude to Hitler to the rest of them, I think, because it wasn’t all that easy persuading them to sign onto to the charter in the first place. An absolutely fascinating question. I suspect if the Russians had got hold of Hitler, there would’ve been no trial of him but that’s just my view.

• Also, just to add in here for me, there’s this book here, “The Nuremberg Interviews” by Leon Goldensohn, and this is based on his interviews and it’s fascinating the chapter of his interviews with Hans Frank, the governor or Butcher of Poland. And Frank spends a lot of that time of the interviews with Goldensohn because he was originally Hitler’s lawyer before Hitler came to power, et cetera, in the twenties.

And a lot of this interview is Frank fantasising to himself. They were all pretty good fantasists. Fantasising that he would defend Hitler in this trial and doing interviews of showing how he would defend, assembling the case as Hitler being the accused, standing in the dock and how he would present the trial, how he would defend Hitler because it would be essential to defend Hitler, to defend Germany, and how he links it with nationalism and the history of Germany. And this is actually, this guy is on trial for his life. Then it ends soon, he’s executed and this is his obsession and fantasy, you know?

• Right. Moving on. Anna, yes, Benjamin Ferencz, the chief prosecutor in the Einsatzgruppen trials. I have seen that documentary of his produced in 2019. I think it’s on YouTube. It’s well worth 'cause he is the last surviving prosecutor. Thank you for your comment.

Margaret, yes, I found it very bizarre when they were chatting together. Well, you know, the accused. I have to say, I’ve never quite seen anything quite like that and even when I’ve dealt with quite a number of people in an ordinary criminal trial. They didn’t seem to behave in quite that sort of, almost as if they were sort of having a little kind of get together.

Q: Margaret, did the accused have interpreters? A: Yes, of course they did. Absolutely.

Q: Were non-German Nazi war crimes ever prosecuted? A: Well, the interesting thing is that roughly 200 people were charged in a series of trades. This was the major one that we’ve concentrated on. There was a doctor’s trial, there was a lawyer’s trial. There were others, roughly 200, but I think they were all Germans if my memory serves me correctly.

Q: Patricia, where were the accused held? A: Well, they were held in Nuremberg. There was a prison there. And yes, they all were sort of rounded up after the surrender, one other point.

Q: Who was the film director? A: I suspect you’re talking the film about Stanley Kramer.

And Nina, I had an internet problem. Who was the man speaking? I suspect you would probably the Burt Lancaster.

• I think that was the Burt Lancaster in “The Judgement at Nuremberg” film clip. He’s playing the eminent jurist on trial after the war.

• No, that’s interesting. So that’s a fascinating point. Let me read it. I’m not going to make a comment, but just fascinating. You may be interested to note, she says, that my husband Norman Din during his military service in 1957, was a consulting physician at the British Military Hospital in Berlin. And his duties include the Spandau prisoners’ physician to the three war criminals, Hess, Speer and von Schirach. When he told his commander that as a Jew he found this quite traumatic, he was told quote, “This is the army and these are your duties.” As he was sworn to 50 year silence, he only revealed this shortly before he passed away in 2008. Fascinating. Thank you so much for sharing that with us.

• Betty, you left out the clip, the end of the Herr Janning speech. We admit that the first of many mistakes was when he was sentenced an innocent man. Absolutely.

• No, that’s not in that clip. That’s not in that clip. That’s not-

• That’s in another clip.

• No, no, no. I’ll tell you how that happens. That’s when the Burt Lancaster, sorry. Burt Lancaster asks his lawyer who of course, Maximilian Schell, whether in fact that Spencer Tracy judge can visit him. It’s the last scene of the entire film. And the Janning character says to the judge, “I never knew it would come to this.”

• Yeah.

• And last words of that was so fantastic is where the Spencer Tracy, Dan Haywood character says, Herr Janning, the first time you sentenced a man whom you knew to be innocent, came to this.

• Yeah. And so Dennis, thank you. Spot on.

• And it’s so powerful, David, it’s so powerful that I teach my students that. I taught my students.

• That’s brilliant.

• First time I taught “Judgement at Nuremberg” was during the apartheid era, and I used to say that those judges who knew that they were sentencing innocent people, people who should never have been sentenced, and there were cases like that. I have mentioned very many courageous South African judges, but there were some who really were evil. And when they did that, that’s when it came to that. It’s wonderful. I agree with you, Leo-

• That’s a brilliant point. Just to add onto that-

• Why don’t you take that point, David. Sorry I interrupted.

• Yeah, just to add on, there was another clip, which if we’d had time, we would’ve shown, where it shows the Jackson character who is not succeeding in his prosecution and interrogation of Goring and Goring’s outwitting him and manipulating with witticisms and bombastic arrogance, et cetera. Because Jackson, in the film, is trying to follow the more inverted commas, “legal path”. And he’s then advised by one of the British, one of the British lawyers, Maxwell Fyfe and Shawcross, the ones that Dennis mentioned earlier, who come up to him and saying, “Listen, the problem is you’re treating him like a leader. You’re giving him too much credence. Treat him like the thug he is.”

And I’ve never forgotten that moment as well as that end moment that Dennis mentioned. It’s such brilliant writing and acting there, because then Jackson goes back, thinks about it, and comes back the next day into the courtroom and it’s an entirely different interaction between him and the way Goring is trying to, he turned the trial into a political circus and outwit him. Leo- I wish that someone teaches it at every school.

• Well, Leo, the point I wanted to make about that if I may, is that I have found it absolutely extraordinary. I showed this two years ago when I was teaching in Melbourne and I was so interested in the reaction of students who essentially spoke about that in general terms. You know, they certainly applied that to America and they certainly applied that to other parts of the world about this question of nationalism and the kind. I found that extra- I didn’t say a word, I just listened to them.

Leslie, never underestimate the power of the big lie. I think David has spoken about that very eloquently, and I agree.

Yes Bernice, there were all these people had PhDs at the Wannsee Conference. I think we’ve spoken about that too.

Rodney, yes, it’s not about intelligence. Organised envy addresses are proven themselves. Well, and a whole range of complexities and I think we’ve spoken briefly about that.

Q: How many of these men died as a result of their crimes? A: I think Carol, I think 10, if I remember, my memory serves. 10 actually were finally executed pursuant to this Nuremberg trial. Of course, as we know, Goring escaped the hangman because he committed suicide as David has mentioned before, but 10 met their fate at the gallows after the trial.

• 10 by execution and one by suicide.

Q: Malcolm, why were so few prosecuted? A: As for the guilt of the German army, the Weirmach scene gave the lie to the alleged. Oh, I see. Yes, of course. ‘Cause we have discussed that in Lockdown University, those conversations at Trent Park. Well, there were roughly 200 people prosecuted over a series of trials. But I’ll tell you what’s particularly interesting, and I’d like to talk about this a little bit next week, because it’s also shown in “Judgement at Nuremberg”. There was a great deal of pressure to get rid of the trials at some point because of the Russian threat and because of the desire of the Allies, the Americans, the Brits, to essentially get the Germans on their side against the Russians, which raises all sorts of fascinating questions.

Q: Doreen, how were the accused rounded up? A: Some of them surrendered, some of them were actually arrested after the war.

• Just to add in there, Goring for example, he was up at Berchtesgarden.

• Yes, he was.

• Because he had claimed he had told Hitler, okay, goodbye. You know, I’m paraphrasing here, but I’ll take over after you. The arrogance of the man, the hubris. Extraordinary. Anyway, so the Americans arrested him and he actually volunteered. He thought he would negotiate a deal, same as Speer, thought he could negotiate, Speer thought he would advise the Western Allies on how to take on Russia, how to rebuild armaments, factories, even under bombing, building underground, et cetera, et cetera, in caves. So Speer almost voluntarily. Goring, almost voluntarily. Thought they would be treated well by the Western Allies because they would be needed against the Russians.

It’s fascinating when you look at some of the Gestapo chiefs and how they ended up working for the Western Allies, which is a separate story we can go onto next week and who were not prosecuted here and not arrested. Rudolf Hess was arrested found working as a farm labourer. The final commandant of Auschwitz. And he was brought to the trial, not prosecuted in this trial, but brought to the trial to give evidence about Auschwitz, which is when the horror came out.

And Gilbert and Kelley interviewed him often and how often he uses the word efficiency and elegance, which is used in one of the other films, the Wannsee Conference film. And it is all about scientific and business-like efficiency and maximising units of labour. All the jargon and phrases which we know only too well today. But it’s fascinating that it was used at this time by these individuals in the trial.

• Yeah. Of course stuff we spoke about last week. I agree with you. I found the “Nuremberg Diary” resume on the line.

• “Nuremberg Diary”. Yeah, the Kelley one is slightly harder to get. This is what’s available on Amazon.

• Yeah. The new-

• Goldensohn book is available.

• The “Nuremberg diary” I’ve downloaded and I read away. Yeah. Intellect is no safeguard. You’re right Rod. And there’s a number here.

Q: Did the UK oppose constants of crime against humanity? A: Well, no, it wasn’t because of their own treatment of co- Well, I mean colonies and US Blacks. I don’t think so because at the end of the day, I’m only relying to a large extent on Philippe Sander’s account and some of the others that I’ve read. They all seem to indicate Lemkin was an extremely awkward man who wasn’t able to persuade in the way Lauterpacht was. And I do think it was that broader context, as I’ve mentioned earlier. Yes, you’re right about the Benjamin Ferencz’s’ well worth prosecuting evil.

Q: Joseph, is it possible to read the psychologist transcripts or notes from the interviews with the Nuremberg defendants? A: Well, I think that as I said, “Nuremberg Diaries” is available. David, I’m not sure if anything else is.

• Yeah, the Kelley is available, the Goldensohn’s available, and the Gilbert is available. One can check through Amazon, probably the easiest. Some of them might be online.

• Yeah, yeah. Ralph, yes, I can comment on the code, because the code was effectively the charter as I’ve indicated, the London Charter. And it was drafted, as I said, I think the principle influences there were Jackson, and of course Lauterpacht had the ear of Jackson, which is why, going back to the earlier question of genocide, he wasn’t persuaded by the genocide idea for all the reasons I’ve already advanced. And Maxwell Fyfe, Lord Jowitt came in later, to be the drafter on the English side, but it was initially Maxwell Fyfe and they were absolutely crucial in the compiling thereof. There were some differences of opinion which then exhibited themselves when the verdict came out but I will talk about that next week.

• Maurice wants to know about the IQ testing is limited value. Yeah, I agree Maurice. It’s just one part, if you like, of the whole jigsaw of trying to understand what is the mindset, who are these humans that we are dealing with? What are these human beings that we are dealing with? Are they out on a limb completely never seen before in human history? Are they insane? Are they pure evil as we might, you know, monsters, et cetera? Are they ordinary and yet capable of such horrific behaviour and acts? You know, trying to piece together. These are the leaders and they’re not insignificant, you know, they are the leaders. And I think the more we can try and understand the whole picture of each jigsaw, the better. Maybe even if it’s a tiny chance of preventing something in the future. That’s the only reason for bringing the IQ stuff.

• Sue and Sandra, the thing I was sent was about Daniel, Daniel Rosenberg, who’s a British lawyer, and I was sent this clip of him talking on a podcast. I’m sure it’s available. Rosenberg.

Q: Linda, did the Russians capture? A: Yes, they did, of course. And they were forced, as I said, I don’t think they would have treated Hitler this way, but they certainly were part where they compromised, and that was why the London Charter allowed that all to happen.

• Dennis, Dennis and David, I just want to say, I’m just jumping in just to say, I want to say thank you very, very much for a fantastic presentation. Judy has very kindly come back just to host this or to monitor this presentation, and I know that she needs to jump off soon.

• Okay. Well then-

• So do you mind If I-

• No, we’ve basically covered almost everything.

• Okay. Well thank you very, very much for a brilliant presentation as always. Thank you for sharing your time and for giving us this time, and thank you everybody for joining us.

• We’ll be back, everyone.

• Thank you everybody, Wendy.

• Everyone take care.

• Thank you.

• Thanks. Take care.

• Bye.

• Thanks. Bye-bye.

• Bye.